Distracted driver rear-ends police chief

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Driving while distracted and hit another car? Not good — especially when the other driver is the chief of police.

A 58-year-old Pinole woman who told officers she had been looking for the earpiece to her hands-free cell phone rear-ended Richmond Police Chief Chris Magnus the other day as the city’s top cop was stopped at a light in his unmarked, city-issued 2008 Chevy Impala.

Funny thing is, the chief said he had seen the woman moments earlier in a shopping center parking lot, equally oblivious while behind the wheel of her 2006 Honda Element.

The woman was in front of Magnus and, with no traffic in sight at about 9 a.m. Friday, could have turned right onto Macdonald Avenue at 44th Street from the shopping center. But she remained motionless.

“I was a little suspicious, because in Richmond, people are usually in a hurry to get where they’re going,” Magnus quipped.

So the chief tapped his horn. She “finally looked up,” he said, and drove off — although very slowly. “Obviously she was preoccupied with her phone there, looking down at it,” Magnus recalled today.

The chief said he passed her and “didn’t think too much about it” as he turned south onto San Pablo Avenue and ended up stopping at a red light at Ohio Street.

“She was tooling up behind me very slowly,” Magnus said. “It was clear she was still looking down and wasn’t going to be able to stop.”

She rear-ended the chief at about 15 mph. Magnus got on the police radio, identified himself as “Adam 1,” and reported that he had been involved in an accident but wasn’t hurt.

Magnus, dressed in plainclothes, got out and made sure she was OK. “She was fine,” the chief said. “I think she more than anything probably a little annoyed at herself.”

He said he never identified himself as the police chief because “she was having a bad enough day at that point.” But he told her

that because he was driving a city vehicle, officers were responding to take a report.

The woman, whose name wasn’t released, was not cited because the officers who responded didn’t witness the crash and weren’t trained in accident reconstruction.

“I didn’t think it was appropriate that I write one because I was involved in it,” Magnus said. The chief added, however, that she would probably be listed as the responsible party on the report and see her insurance premium go up.

The woman told officers that she had been fumbling around, trying to find her earpiece. “I guess that’s possible, although it seems like a long time to be doing that,” Magnus said.